A website launched today by the UK’s Conservative Party is titsup, at time of writing.
The MyConservatives.com site, which claims to be “the most ambitious party political campaigning network of its kind outside of the US” is currently redirecting to the Tories’ main website while the party tries to fix the problem. …

I think they should use this template...

@Lee Jackson 1

@jackharrer

You do realise that www.example.com and example.com need not be the same site, and in fact the hierarchal nature of DNS, and the fact that the Web is NOT the Internet means that semantically this is the case unless defined otherwise.

To put it another way, yet another person who cannot type in the URL for the site they want correctly (hint: if you want the web-site on a domain, type the bloody WWW).

at

There's no such thing as a good political party

@John70 - Like the Tories didn't also make a mess of things!

Or have you forgotten the embarrassment of how amateurishly the railways were privatised, the fact that it was the Tories who got us into the EEC in the first place, how they privatised all the utilities so that they were then sold off at vast profit to foreign companies and now the service levels are non-existent, how they de-regulated financial services so that house prices are so high now that you need two salaries just to afford them, how Maggie centralised everything that was previously run by the county councils - etc etc.

People are very selective in their memories and this is the basis of belief in any political party. There's no such thing as a good politician and anyone who things so is naive.

Lean and mean

@AC and @jeremy3

@AC: Oct 2nd 14:41 whilst you're technically correct about DNS, try educating users to type "www" simply because they get a DNS fail. Marketing a site without the "www" and not setting up a DNS entry for the domain sans "www" is a novice mistake irrespective of the inner workings of the DNS scheme.

@jeremy3: Yes there are; Amazon Elastic Load Balancing - been live in the US for ages and went live on the EU region earlier this week

@AC 17.06 - that is not auto provisioning.

You still have to have the instances to start with.

You or I could not set up a little website on a cloud instance (like a virtual dedicated box) and say to the provider "expand server and bandwidth to cope with the demand since it will be on tv tonight, and at that point the traffic will be 10x for about 2 hours then back to normal... "

If I believed...

A fair criticism of this UK government, and their civil service, is that they are utterly incapable of organising and running any IT system.

A good selling point for a political party hoping for election would be that they can do this new-fangled computer stuff.

On this evidence, the Tory party can't. Which is pretty much what we all expected.

Problem is, neither can any other party. (Good thing in the case of the BNP. Can you imagine it? "That Mr Griffin may have be a right-wing racist thug, but at least he made the websites work on time!")

We need MPs and civil servants who can speak C# and Java, not Greek and Latin.

(Sits back and waits for the replies that say "No!!!!!! SMALLTALK / PYTHON / COBAL etc)...

Don't forget the Tory's record on democracy...

"Maggie centralised everything that was previously run by the county councils - etc etc."

Remember the Met Boro Councils? GLC, etc? The Tories didn't like the idea that all those millions of people in those inner cities ('oh, we must do something about the inner cities,' she once said) didn't want to vote Tory.

No problem, we will just take the franchise away from them. So they abolished the councils, effectively removing a layer of democracy they didn't like, and replaced all those services with overarching QUANGOs.

@jeremy3 - check your facts

Elastic Load Balancing is precisely there to initiate auto-provisioning. You set caps on the number of instances you want to launch, reaction times for when to launch them, and when to kill them, dependent upon a number of factors such as CPU usage and traffic.